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Topic: Building a Welding Worklight (Read 837 times)

Lately I have been having difficulty MIG welding. I had similar issues with TIG welding and was able to overcome it with lots of ambient light. But I recently purchased a MIG welder and I cannot see anything no mater how much white light I put to it. Apparently MIG welding puts out less light in the green spectrum than TIG welding.

In any case I did some research on this and found a guy who patented a green LED welding work light just for this purpose. Well he patented it but its not on the market yet so therefore I need to build my own. So far I have tried a green hog hunting flashlight and found it to be at least as powerful as using a off road vehicle white light that had about 10x the power so the theory seems to be positive. I just need to build a plug in green version of the off road light.

My first approach is to use 3 Cree XM-L LED T6 green spectrum lights. But I am having trouble understanding how to connect the drivers. I got these from E-bay and they came with no directions except what was on the E-bay add which is different than the ones I have. The picture from E-bay shows 4 connections Input 12V Anode labeled V+, Input 12V Cathode labeled C1, Output 3V Anode labeled L1+, Output 3V Cathode labeled L1-. But the drivers I received do not exactly have the same terminals. If I had to guess I would say V+ = V+, V- = C1, L+ = L1+ and L1- = L-. Can anyone confirm.

Also having found bicycle lights with 7 XM-L LED T6 I was considering replacing the white LEDs with Green ones accept the LED chips seem to be manufactured directly into the light, instead of the small Aluminum mounting plates that are available on E-bay. Is it possible to replace a single LED chip.